Statistical office set for change

By Lemach Lavari
The National Statistical Office (NSO) is undergoing reform and will be carrying out three major projects next year, chief statistician Roko Koloma says.
He said the projects were data collection on all companies registered with the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA), Household Expenditure Survey and the 2020 National Census.
He said the ’20 Census would be the biggest exercise of the three.
The Household Expenditure Survey is to be carried out throughout next year.
The results should provide information on what Papua New Guineans are spending their money on and the income distribution in the country, Koloma said.
He said the strategy for reform of NSO was set from 2015 to 2019.
Koloma said NSO was in the process of building systems that
would enable it to produce important statistics such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on a timely basis.
He said the exercise was based on a 2014 government decision that called for reform.
He said prior to 2014, the NSO did not compile national accounts.
These accounts were produced to measure the GDP estimates of the country.
GDP measures the economic performance of the country.
“We have produced a series (of GDP report) from 2007 to 2014, 2015 will be released next week.”
Koloma said NSOs worldwide were guided by standards and methods, and the reform for the PNG NSO was to operate according the world standards.
He said since the NSO strived to reform in 2015, it had improved its production.
Key areas of the reform were capacity-building of staff and meeting world standards and methods in statistics production.